Frank Miller Takes on Al Qaeda Threat in Holy Terror

By Jason Apuzzo. According to today’s Los Angeles Times Hero Complex blog, Frank Miller – best known as the writer and artist of The Dark Knight Returns, 300 and Sin City – is in the final stages of completing a long-developing project of his that will pit a brand-new superhero character called ‘The Fixer’ against Al Qaeda.

This long-awaited project, which began initially as a storyline for Batman – and was supposedly rejected for political reasons by D.C. Comics (Miller disputes the long-standing rumors to that effect) – will apparently be published next year (Miller is speaking to publishers right now) with the title, Holy Terror.

This is wonderful news, as I’d thought this project had been abandoned by Miller some time ago.  Here’s Miller:

“It’s almost done; I should be finished within a month,” Miller said. “It’s no longer a DC book. I decided partway through it that it was not a Batman story. The hero is much closer to ‘Dirty Harry’ than Batman. It’s a new hero that I’ve made up that fights Al Qaeda …

“The character is called The Fixer and he’s very much an adventurer who’s been essentially searching for a mission,” Miller said. “He’s been trained as special ops and when his city is attacked all of a sudden all the pieces fall into place and all this training comes into play. He’s been out there fighting crime without really having his heart in it — he does it to keep in shape. He’s very different than Batman in that he’s not a tortured soul. He’s a much more well-adjusted creature even though he happens to shoot 100 people in the course of the story …

“I pushed Batman as far as he can go and after a while he stops being Batman. My guy carries a couple of guns and is up against an existential threat. He’s not just up against a goofy villain. Ignoring an enemy that’s committed to our annihilation is kind of silly, It just seems that chasing the Riddler around seems silly compared to what’s going on out there …

“It began as my reaction to 9/11 and it was an extremely angry piece of work and as the years have passed by I’ve done movies and I’ve done other things and time has provided some good distance, so it becomes more of a cohesive story as it progresses,” Miller said.

Needless to say, we’re very excited to learn this and wish Miller the best.

What Miller touches on here is one of the things that’s been bothering me the most about the post-9/11 boom in comic book movies: which is their tendency to feature narcissistic heroes who almost never (Iron Man excepted) are asked to face the current terrorist threat.  This is something that is a complete betrayal of what happened in the 1940s, when so many of the original comic book heroes were asked to face down the Nazi/fascist threat.  So good on Frank for pushing through and completing this, and bad on D.C. for ripping this storyline away from the Batman series if indeed that’s what happened.

Miller is also right now of course working on his 12-part Dark Horse comics series called Xerxes, which is a prequel to 300.  And Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad are already at work on the screenplay for that.

Posted on July 29th, 2010 at 10:36am.